Sometimes you can have high expectations for things that just don't pan
out.... In the first 150 pages of Ishmael I was quite impressed with
how neatly Dan Quinn brought out some of the deeply one-sided views
nearly everyone in the developed world shares, but then he ended the
book with not much more than that we made a mess of the world because
changing things is 'not our job' (the earth doesn't belong to man but
man to the earth). I think that's an inadequate explanation of how
the 'knowledge of good & evil' explains our undoing as a species, and
maybe Quinn should have left his good questions on the subject as just
that.
My point of view has long been that our way of 'changing things for the
better' (rephrasing the premise of the 'fall' that fixing things is our
problem) goes wrong mostly because we overdo it, i.e. have a flawed
sense of limits. Looking around for widely shared deeply one-sided
views of the 'requisite variety' I find the common belief that people
have choice and all other things are controlled from outside. That's
equivalent to a denial that anything in the world has an 'inside' except
humans. The fact is that virtually anything that grows demonstrably
has a real independent interior behavior and design. We don't easily
see them because the interiors of things are inside them and naturally
hidden. I think denying the animating interiors of everything in the
world but ourselves would quite directly blind us to the thresholds we
cross as multiplying good things goes bad. Verifying and finding
diverse powerful examples seems easy.
Phil Henshaw ????.?? ? `?.????
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040
tel: 212-795-4844
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com
explorations: www.synapse9.com <
http://www.synapse9.com/>
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